My suggestions for Occupy Wall Street protesters: Letter

View full sizeAP photoIn this Oct. 18, 2011 photo, Occupy Wall Street protestors work on their computers at the media area in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.

If we destroy a firm of the stature of Goldman Sachs that employs 35,000, what have we gained?

Sure it's good to dissent, to differ in opinion, but to bring them down would be morally wrong. How many of the 35,000 are your neighbors? Do you paint all of them with the same brush, the same as a racist would.

When you attempt to destroy Goldman Sachs will you stop there or will you close down another firm of almost equal size and put 50,000 out on the street? Or Chase, which employs 168,800? Chase loaned 250,000 small businesses $10 billion.

CitiBank, a giant in the banking and investment world, employs 260,000 people, and helped Ford Motor Company go public, which kept thousands of Americans employed.
If 10 percent of a company did an alleged wrong, do you punish the other 90 percent?

Unemployed people need employed people to sustain them, for in a democracy a government can only borrow money that working taxpayers pay into unemployment, Social Security and federal taxes. The more unemployment the more taxes working people would have to pay.

Marcus Goldman, an immigrant from Germany, was as close to poverty as some protesters think they are.

He started out as peddler with a horse drawn cart, then he became a shop keeper in Philadelphia in 1869. There was no safety net to fall back on as the protesters have. It was guts and hard work of more than 60 hours a week that put him in the position he achieved. He took partners in so others could became successful. Ironically, he helped new businesses get started by becoming a broker in IOUs with his capital on the line.

Firms like Goldman Sachs are as necessary today as they were then. Each protester can do what Marcus did and hang out a shingle. When property owners of brownstones in Brooklyn felt they were being ripped off by their insurance carrier, they didn't camp out on Pine Street, where most insurance companies were. They used their God-given ability and formed one of the more successful insurance companies in America.

Can you start your own credit card company, bank, etc.? Of course you can.